The 2015 West Coast Classic was held recently in Singapore, and sOMEThING player Christopher Chia took home top honors in the 1A Pro Division! Check out video of all the Pro Division winners below, and be sure to check out the Spinworkx YouTube channel for video of the Spinner Division (Amateur) winners!

1A Pro Division

1st Place – Christopher Chia

2nd Place – Marcus Koh

3rd Place – Ian Loh

4th Place – Sean Hung

5th Place – Brena Cheong

2A Pro Division

1st Place – Chong Yichen

2nd Place – Li Tiancheng

4A Pro Division

1st Place – Sean Hung

2nd Place – Ian Loh

3rd Place – Kenneth Bay

5A Pro Division

1st Place – Malcolm Chiu

2nd Place – Chong Yichen

3rd Place – Jeremy Tan

Results are in and video is up for the 2014 Eastern State Throwdown contest, held September 13th in Singapore. Check out video below for the top 3 winners in each Pro Division, and head over to the Spinworkx YouTube channel to see the winners from the Spinner (Amateur) division!

Pro 1A Division

1st Place – Jason Cheow

2nd Place – Malcolm Chiu

3rd Place – Jeremy Tan

Pro 2A Division

1st Place – Ian Loh

2nd Place – Kenneth Bay

Pro 4A Division

1st Place – Kwan Jun Jie

2nd Place – Jeremy Tan

3rd Place – Chong Yichen

Pro 5A Division

1st Place – Ian Loh

2nd Place – Lee Wei Ting

3rd Place – Kenneth Bay

Greetings, gentle readers, and welcome to another installment of #trickcircle! We’re scouring Instagram for 15-second bursts of yoyoing and posting our favorites here. Check out the videos, follow the players, get inspired, and go out and throw. (Don’t forget to tag your own clips with #trickcircle and join the fun!)

To many people, JonRob is the @5AGOAT; he is widely remembered for bringing tech 5A to the masses through his battles with Jake Bullock, but wants to remind people that he’s been “going big since day one.” This wrap & tangler combo definitely backs up that statement, and the continuous motion is a great contrast to his more laidback counterweight tech. JonRob & Tyler Severance were some of the very first people to integrate wraps & tanglers into competition 5A, so if you’ve ever wanted to learn some of those, you could definitely start by picking apart this sequence.

Riccardo Fraolini (@blablanchard) has been featured on #trickcircle before, but how could we not run this insane suicide sequence? No wonder CLYW wanted to pick him up. Riccardo could easily be called the king of the instaclip: seems like every week he’s got another one of these jawdropping tricks. Riccardo’s banger elements are definitely what grabs your attention, but there is also a huge amount of care in crafting the way that these moves flow so seamlessly into each other, and he deserves credit for finding the optimal links between simple moves. And that final suicide! What?!

Serezhk Basygin (@serezhkabasygin, via @aeroyorussia) may not be a household name yet, but with tricks like this it seems like it must only be a matter of time. As is coming to be the standard for Russian 1A, this combo is almost entirely dense, technical maneuvers, including a number of clever slack GT setups, but what really caught my attention is the steady sense of pacing. Pauses are often seen as flaws for breaking up the flow, forcing players to become faster & faster, but this trick is a great example of how slowing down can really boost a trick’s impact. He uses pauses to draw attention to the mounts & elements and let them sink in before mutating them again, and the breakdown to GT halfway through the trick is a beautiful example of tension & release.

In the spirit of 5A May, Junpei Shimizu (@junpei_5a) shows three counterweight entrances to a popular variation on the reverse bind. This is a great use of the Instagram format, using the relatively small amount of time to showcase a few different moves that fit together well, and bonus points to him for hitting them all in the same take. These elements might look simple taken on their own, but they are all well-constructed combo finishers and well-worth adding to your repertoire.

Did you learn that bind in the last trick? Here’s Maxim Gruzintsev (@decaika) using a similar bind in the middle of a 1A trick to catch the yo-yo and switch into a horizontal combo. Players have been chasing plane-changing regens for a while now, but with the increased sophistication of horizontal play and the recent trend of using stalls & catches mid-combo the field is starting to get really interesting. This is definitely one of the more seamless entrances yet, and the implications for a contest situation are enormous: why waste time between tricks catching & throwing into a horizontal combo when you can just switch in the middle? He has a stop-n-go entrance that ain’t bad neither... oh, and he got attacked by a cat on camera. You gotta see that. Cat attack!

Spinworkx posted results and video for their 2014 West Coast Classic event, held in Singapore this past weekend. Looks like it was a great event with some top notch talent, as we’ve come to expect from the amazing and long-running scene in Singapore.

1A Pro Division

1st Place – Marcus Koh

2nd Place – Ian Loh

3rd Place – Sean Hung

2A Pro Division

1st Place – Chong Yichen

2nd Place – Li Tiancheng

3rd Place – Jeremy Tan

4A Pro Division

1st Place – Sean Hung

2nd Place – Ian Loh

3rd Place – Kenneth Bay

5A Pro Division

1st Place – Malcolm Chiu

2nd Place – Chong Yichen

1A Spinner Division

1st Place – Javier Soong

2A Spinner Division

1st Place – Alexander Teo

4A Spinner Division

1st Place – Wee Teng Ee

5A Spinner Division

1st Place – D. Karthikeyan

The #trickcircle tag on Instagram is blowing up with yo-yo players sharing their tricks, and we here at @Yoyonews are picking out the best ones to share every week. This second installment also features our first batch of mini-interviews, in which Yuji sheds light on the thinking behind his combo and Mark questions just what the heck “flow” is supposed to mean anyways. More bangers from John Ando, Malcom Chiu, and more after the jump.

@johnando starts the week off with a huge bang, or rather two: back-to-back bangers in this video, and a second round of brilliant concepts in another. John Ando is perhaps most often remembered for his 2008 World-winning freestyle when he reminded everybody that a trick could be compelling with only a few string hits, and his opening wrap to trapeze proves this to be as true as ever. John is also a world-class 2A player, which surely informs his movement-oriented style and gives you an idea where the idea for a wrap like that comes from. The trick that follows is just as gnarly: while he can make a single string hit look good, he is in no way limited to simple tricks, and sequences like this rack up the points quick. This combo has a particularly satisfying punchline in the form of an elbow slack catch which sets up into a ripcord release, the impact of which is greatly increased by John’s performing it behind his shoulder. There are very few players who can space their tricks the way that John does, and I dearly hope we see more #trickcircle tricks from him soon.

@clywlevi (AKA Mark Mangarin of CLYW) was kind enough to take the time to answer a few questions about this instaclip, “Maclean.”

Yoyonews: What, if anything, was the genesis of this trick? Was there a theme you wanted to explore or did the moves just gel together?

Mark Mangarin: I was creating an extension to a combo that Adam Schultz was working on when I was hanging out with him and Andrew Maider in NYC — ideas from this were adapted into the first segment. The rest was made in conjunction, but it’s part of a much longer trick that doesn’t fit in the instagram time limit (:15 goes by so fast). Theres a debate about the concise definition of ‘flow’ going around right now, so I’m playing around with different approaches.

YYN: What is your personal definition of “flow”?

MM: Haha, oh shoot. Honestly, I don’t like to bother defining the concept. It’s like asking what the meaning of hipster or ratchet is…

I don’t think theres a specific definition. Going by what the community considers flow, then both JD and Sid have “really good flow” so it’s wrong to consider flow as the smoothness about specific physical motions. It has more to do with one’s timing/execution, but it can be uniquely good per person and what’s considered good flow can change over time very quickly, so I think of flow as a vague/undefined subset of someone’s execution style and trick construction.

YYN:What would you consider the centerpiece or main idea you’d like to communicate with this trick?

MM: Personally I think the execution, but the reverse quarterstack whip is a big takeaway too. It’s the easiest to explain compared to the rest of the trick, but a reverse quarterstack mount leaves you with many options because you can drop the loop using your elbow.

YYN: The drop before the reverse quarterstack (trapeze-brother elbow catch) seems somewhat different from your usual combo construction. What are the benefits and disadvantages of including a pause like that in a trick?

MM: I usually never drop strings/mounts randomly as it can make tricks look shallow. I’m just messing around with different things right now, as #trickcircle seems like a good outlet to share ideas including those not fully developed. I think it gives more attention to the whip, but maybe someone out there can make a full drop look good?

While the community may be a ways off from agreeing on a definition of “flow”, few would disagree that @andrewbergen has it in spades. His first entry into the #trickcircle canon, titled “jsmy”, opens with what appears to be a shockwave-inspired chopsticks combo that sets up a lovely falling slack whip before folding its way into a complex triangular string formation. Much of this trick’s strength comes from the sense of rhythm that it establishes early on with back & forth motions, and we at Yoyonews are all hoping that Andrew graces us with some more choice bits of tech soon.

UK National Champ and Yoyofactory star @yujirobert dipped a toe into the #trickcircle waters with this Yuuki-influenced tech tour de force. He also filled us in on the details behind it with a short interview:

Yoyonews: What, if anything, was the central idea behind this combo? What did you want to showcase or express most?

Yuji Shimokawa Kelly: The central element I wanted to showcase is the slack drop which happens just where i’ve selected the screen cap. I wanted to create an effect where i would drop the slack with my arms pointed to the right, and then dismount using the same movement to the left. This was the first time I’d actually filmed it, and I can see that it doesn’t work quite as well as I had hoped.

YYN: Looks good to us. Do you name your tricks?

YSK: I very rarely name my tricks, and this particular one I don’t think is name worthy just yet.

YYN: Would you say this trick is “finished”? How can you tell when a trick is complete?

In terms of the combo, far from it. I don’t think first and second half will ultimately be part of the same combo, I just wanted to fit them on one clip. Watching the clip back, I’m finding a couple of little things I can change to improve it.

YYN: We’ll be excited to see what this turns into, thanks for the look!

A post shared by C3yoyodesign (@c3yoyodesign) on Nov 16, 2013 at 3:32am PST

Taking a quick trip from England to Hong Kong, we have @jackey_li of team @c3yoyodesign showing us just how good slack can look in slow motion. Slomo really helps break down the subtleties of the trick here, and the fact that it’s only a few moves makes it very tempting to learn. Just because it’s short does not mean that it’s easy, and Jackey packs some serious depth into it: in addition to looking pretty, the opening rejection sets up a clever slack move that gets the strings in place for the following sequence of pops culminating in a triangle.

If you’re anything like us, you probably had to watch the latest tricks from @meowcolm (AKA Malcolm Chiu of Duncan Crew) a couple of times before they made any sort of sense at all. Fortunately, Malcolm’s supplemented the mobile video with an HD slomo clip of some other lassos so you can really gawk at that perfect loop before he hucks it into the gap… but you’re probably going to need some practice before you can get that cross-handed GT down. Apparently, the 720 lasso root trick is Jesse Christe‘s creation, and Malcolm is to be commended for both taking it to another level and properly citing his sources.

Want more insta-madness? Don’t forget to check out all the videos tagged with #trickcircle and submit some of your own for a chance to be featured next week… and, hey! Follow @yoyonews while you’re at it, yeah? Here are some of our other favorites of the week that we didn’t have time to write about.

Flip tricks are a fairly new element, borne out of the realization that a stalled yo-yo need not stay in a single plane the way a spinning yo-yo does. They could be seen as cousins to the suicide, because the meat of the trick is throwing and catching a loop of string, with the crucial difference being that the motion of the loop comes from the stalled yo-yo rotating off-axis. The foundational flip tricks were created on fixed axle yo-yos, and the high-walled responsive nature of fixies may make them easier to learn on, but as Ed pointed out last week these concepts can be applied to bearings just as easily. (Speaking of applying responsive concepts to modern play, did everybody catch Alexis JV’s crazy new video? Holy smokes!)

The first trick in the video is the one that started it, the kickflip suicide. Catch the yo-yo in a trapeze stall, swing it forward, and release the string when the yo-yo is roughly horizontal. With practice, you should be able to send the yo-yo into a controlled flip with the string loop following behind so that when the yo-yo comes back around you can catch the loop on your finger. This is probably the easiest flip trick to learn, as the concept is fairly straightforward, but the execution can admittedly be a little tricky at first; make sure your string tension is good, try to get as big a loop as possible, and GO SLOW. I find this trick gets way easier when I try to focus on moving the yo-yo through a long, slow, graceful flip. It helps you build your control, and gives you more time to stick the landing.

Any readers familiar with skateboard tricks should be able to guess the next trick: heelflips. These are basically “reverse kickflips” where you flip the string towards you instead of away from you—a little bit easier said than done, but made simpler if you turn your hand towards yourself for the catch. I showed this trick earlier this month in our Imperialism column where I did the whole thing from an inverted trapeze stall rather than a normal trapeze stall; this makes throwing the loop a lot easier, in my opinion, but the mount may be more difficult, so really just see what works best for you.

The FS (“Frontside”) Flip is a new one, and definitely a little bit more advanced. As the yo-yo moves through a kickflip, bring your throwhand around the yo-yo as though you’re doing a 360. There’s definitely a trick in timing your hand to properly follow the rotation of the yo-yo, but it’s enormously satisfying once you land it. If you get the hang of this one, try rotating the opposite direction for a backside flip, or get even crazier with a frontside heel.

Shuvits are the newest addition to the flip trick family. Where the kickflip flips the yo-yo forward, shuvits push the yo-yo in a flat spin, which is a bit of an exciting mix-up. While it’s possible to throw a shuvit from a straight stall, it’s much more fun to pre-load the spin by swinging the stalled yo-yo to the side and twisting the string up. When the yo-yo starts to untwist, spread the loop with your fingers and throw it around the axis of rotation. It takes a little practice to see where the loop is going to end up, but once you can catch it at the end of a 360 you feel like a genius. I personally think that sticking a clean landing with no extra twists is the most satisfying, but there’s a certain joy in catching it and letting it continue to twist, and Rafael even suggested that you could let it twist back into a reverse shuvit(!) I find it helps a lot to move your throwhand up above the yo-yo so that the loop can move more cleanly.

Okay… those are some of the foundation tricks. Now, we’ll have a short interlude with a stalled magic drop (more on that later!) and get into some new stuff.

First off, the mach-5 whip flip. This was hinted at in the Whips installment of FF but was way too hard at the time for me to actually hit (haha.) Basically, you set up a houdini mount, throw a kickflip suicide, and whip the thumb loop horizontally around your hand to catch the yo-yo as you complete the suicide. Definitely a precision trick, but immensely satisfying when you stick it. One million internet points to the first person who can show me this whip with a shuvit…

Next in the advanced concepts, we got a shuvit 180 drop suicide. This trick is a tribute to the era when Yuuki was doing all these super sick drop suicides and all I could ever learn was the 2or0 to 1.5 drop. Sorry buddy!.. but I digress. The setup is a double or nothing, which is immediately followed by twisting the yo-yo to setup for a shuvit. As soon as the yo-yo launches, you’re going to move your non-throwhand up as though you’re supporting a trapeze-brother and get your throwhand in position to catch the loop as it rotates around. When you catch it, the yo-yo should be stalled on the opposite side, which lends itself to all kinds of tech applications.

Finally, the Kwijibo Flip. This trick was teased in my FACoatW Warmup column, but I think this version (without flipping your hands over) works a little better. Kickflipping from trapeze to 1.5 isn’t too tough… 1.5 to 2or0, well, I encourage you all to try it!

This should keep your hands full for the weekend, but if you want some more flip tricks to practice, you might want to check out these tricks from Alex Curfman, Malcolm Chiu, and of course the Fixed Friday archives. Ed recently responded to the shuvit with a varial flip, something I’ve been totally unable to hit thusfar. Happy throwing, everybody!

We had over 600 entries for the CLYW Bip Bop Cliff Giveaway…thanks so much to everyone who entered! The creativity on display was amazing! What started as kind of a personal favorite for us turned into a validation that picture tricks are alive and well in modern yoyoing.

The judges for the contest were Chris Mikulin (CLYW), John W. Robot (CLYW) and me, Steve Brown (YoYoNews). And here are your winners!

1st Place Winner – Malcolm Chiu (Singapore)

Malcolm had 15 entries into the contest and at least half of them could have won. The complexity and density of his various star variations is incredible, but this one was our favorite! Malcolm wins the grand prize, a CLYW Bip Bop Cliff, 100 Kitty Strings, and a CLYW Sticker Pack.

2nd Place – Drew Tetz (USA)

Drew has been a long-time picture trick aficionado, and the simple sweetness of his tricks tends to carefully hide their complexity and creativity. Plus: no one ever looks like they’re having as much fun as Drew! Drew wins the second prize, a CLYW 5-panel camouflage cap, 100 Kitty Strings, and a CLYW Sticker Pack.

3rd Place – Stas Litvinov (Kazakhstan)

Stas had a handful of unique and creative entries, but his “Birdie in a Cage” was everything we love about picture tricks. A simple concept executed really, really well, “Birdie in a Cage” is just a really pretty trick that takes an old favorite and makes it new again. Stas wins the third prize, 100 Kitty Strings and a CLYW Sticker Pack.